Thomas Lincoln
Thomas Lincoln | |
|---|---|
| File:Lincoln-Thomas 01.jpg Thomas Lincoln (1778-1851) | |
| Born | January 6, 1778 |
| Died | January 17, 1851 (aged 73) |
| Occupation(s) | Farmer, Carpenter |
| Spouse(s) | Nancy Hanks (1806-1818; her death) Sarah Bush Johnston (1819-1851) |
| Children | Sarah Lincoln Grigsby Abraham Lincoln Thomas Lincoln |
| Parent(s) | Abraham Lincoln and Bathsheba Herring |
| Relatives | Mordecai Lincoln (brother) Josiah Lincoln (brother) Mary Lincoln (sister) Nancy Lincoln (sister) |
Thomas Lincoln (January 6, 1778 – January 17, 1851) was an American farmer and father of President Abraham Lincoln.
Ancestors
Thomas Lincoln was descended from Samuel Lincoln, a Puritan from East Anglia who landed in Massachusetts (possibly Hingham) in 1637. Some Lincolns migrated into Berks County, Pennsylvania, where they intermarried with Quakers, and later descendants dispersed into Appalachia and other backcountry [1]. Abraham Lincoln later recalled that early Lincolns joined Quaker churches, but that later generations were not as "peculiar" in their beliefs. However, Quakers and Puritans were both opposed to slavery.
Early life
Thomas was born in Rockingham County, Virginia, the fourth child of Abraham Lincoln (1744–1786) and Bathsheba Herring (c1742–1836). He moved to the state of Kentucky in the 1780s with his family.[2] In May 1786, Thomas witnessed the murder of his father by Native Americans "…when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest." That fall, his mother moved the family to Washington County, Kentucky (near Springfield), where Thomas lived until the age of eighteen. From 1795 to 1802, Thomas held a variety of jobs in several locations.
Religion
As a young man, Lincoln became active in the Primitive Baptist church (also known as Predestinarian or Separate Baptists) and eventually became a leader in the denomination. According to several historians, "Thomas Lincoln was "one of the five or six most important men" among the Indiana Separates, and it becomes clear that, for all effective purposes, Abraham Lincoln's life in Indiana was lived in an atmosphere of what William Barton called "a Calvinism that would have out-Calvined Calvin." [3] In Indiana Thomas Lincoln served as a trustee of the Pigeon Creek Baptist Church and helped to build the church meeting house with Abraham.[4] Thomas Lincoln had religious grounds for disliking slavery.
Marriage and family
Kentucky
In 1802 he moved to Hardin County, Kentucky, where one year later he purchased a 238-acre (1.0 km2) farm. Four years later, on June 12, 1806, he married Nancy Hanks. A record of their marriage bond is located at the Washington County, Kentucky courthouse.
Their first child, a daughter named Sarah Lincoln, was born in 1807. By early 1809, Thomas bought another farm, 300-acre (1.2 km2), in Nolin Creek, Kentucky. There on February 12, 1809, his son Abraham was born. In 1811, Thomas and his family moved to Knob Creek Farm. In 1812, a third child, Thomas, Jr., died in infancy.
Nancy Hanks may have been one of the Quaker Hanks who migrated to Pennsylvania in the 1680s [5]. Neighbors reported [6] that Nancy Hanks Lincoln was "superior" to her husband, a strong personality who taught young Abraham his letters as well as the extraordinary sweetness and forbearance he was known for all his life. Quakers had the nearest of all English settlers to equality between the sexes [7], so this side of Nancy Hanks suggests that her background was, indeed, Quaker.
Quakers also showed affection for their children [8], unlike the austere Puritans. Hence Abraham's gratitude to his mother, who loved and gave him his self-esteem.
Quakers however did not have more love of learning than Puritans. That Thomas could not read or write was the unhappy consequence of subsistence agriculture in the back country where life's emphasis was placed on clearing the land and putting food on the table. The killing of Thomas's father when he was only eight made education difficult to obtain. Lincoln, probably alluding to his mother's education and spirituality, said later that everything he was, he owed to her.
Thomas was active in community and church affairs in Hardin County. He served as a jury member, a petitioner for a road, and as a guard for county prisoners. He was a rough carpenter and hired hand most of his youth. Like other uneducated young men, he may have been vulnerable to scams and land fraud, though the land laws themselves were vague. He lost farms three times after boundary disputes. Discouraged by these setbacks, he decided to move his family to Indiana where the land ordinance of 1785 ensured that land once purchased and paid for was retained. Further, slavery had been excluded in Indiana by the Northwest Ordinance. Abraham Lincoln claimed many years later that his father’s move from Kentucky to Indiana was "partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty of land titles in Kentucky."
Indiana
In December 1816, the Lincolns settled near Little Pigeon Creek where Thomas and Abraham set to work carving a home from the Indiana wilderness. Father and son worked side by side to clear the land, plant the crops and build a home. Thomas also found that his skills as a carpenter were in demand as the community grew.
In October 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln contracted milk sickness by drinking milk of a cow that had eaten the white snakeroot plant. There was no cure for the disease and on October 5, 1818, Nancy died. For over a year, Thomas and his children lived alone. He went back to Kentucky to seek bride. He found Sarah Bush Johnston, who was the ["the"? there was only one widow in Elizabethtown?] widow from Elizabethtown, Kentucky. On December 2, 1819 he married her. Sarah and her three children, Elizabeth, Matilda, and John, joined Abraham, Sarah and Dennis Hanks (a cousin of Nancy's who had lived with the Sparrow family, before they also died from milk sickness) to make a new family of eight.
[In the early] 1820's, Thomas was under considerable financial pressure after his marriage because he had to support a household of eight people. (Due aging and ill health) For a time he could rely on Dennis Hanks to help provide for his large family, but in 1826 Dennis married Elizabeth Johnston, Sarah Bush Lincoln's daughter, and moved to his own homestead. As Abraham became an adolescent, his father grew more and more to depend on him for the "farming, grubbing, hoeing, making fences" necessary to keep the family afloat. He also regularly hired his son out to work for other farmers in the vicinity, and by law he was entitled to everything the boy earned until he came of age.[9]
Illinois
Thomas had a restless nature and when John Hanks, a cousin who had once lived with the Lincolns, moved to Illinois and sent back glowing reports of fertile prairie that didn't need the backbreaking work of clearing forest before crops could be planted, he sold his Indiana land and moved first to Macon County, Illinois and eventually to Coles County in 1831. The homestead site on Goosenest Prairie, about 10 miles (16 km) south of Charleston, Illinois, is preserved as the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site, although his [whos's?] original saddlebag log cabin was lost after being disassembled and shipped to Chicago for display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Thomas Lincoln, already in his fifties, remained a resident of the county for the rest of his life and is buried at nearby Shiloh Cemetery. [10]
Relationship with son Abraham Lincoln
Template:Cleanupsection Thomas's relationship with his son Abraham was probably typical of that time and place. For the first two hundred years in the Colonies and then in the United States, relations between parents and children were marked by duty and obedience. Affection between Puritan fathers and sons was non-existent. Affection for their children or lack of it must have been the biggest difference between Thomas and his first wife Nancy Hanks, and between him and Abraham's stepmother who was partly of Quaker descent; she, too, was very fond of Abraham. Affection amongst the Puritans came after parents commonly started living past their fifties, and after the All Men are Created Equal ethos that took hold after the Declaration of Independence. Fischer called it a revolution in age relations [11]. But the effects were slow to be felt in the hardscrabble world Thomas inhabited. In 1809 he was still the exalted elder, Abraham's job was to obey him. On dirt farms, children were physical assets, and parents exploited them. The Quakers as well as the Puritans thought of their children as servants [12]. Tall and strong for his age, Abraham was put to work early.
There is no evidence that Thomas encouraged his son's education [6]. It would not have been logical for that time. On the contrary, contemporaries tell that he occasionally burned Abraham's books because he thought reading was an indolent pastime that interfered with real work [13]. Nancy Hanks Lincoln thought Abraham should learn his letters, but her Quaker background was in agreement with Thomas': too much reading was considered a distraction [14]. This attitude persisted well into the 20th Century in rural communities. Thomas sometimes struck Abraham if he thought he was neglecting his work by doing too much reading, or if he inserted himself into adult conversations.[15] By his stepmother's account [6] Abraham was a sweet, accommodating child, never defiant, so it's difficult to explain Thomas's harshness any other way than that it was how he was treated as a child. When he hired out his son to pay off a debt, he was doing no worse than thousands of other fathers who needed cash. In fact his mother probably hired him out. But it meant the end of Abraham's chances to go to school, as it had been the end of his own [16].
Subservience to a father who showed no affection, who did not appreciate his gifts, and who, his son could not help but notice [6], was not his intellectual equal (no one was), had to be trying. Abraham's later allusions to his father's lack of ambition were the sort of shot his generation would make at the older one. For Abraham's generation was astonishingly ambitious.
It had been the way for generations that the last son continued in bondage till the father died, then inherited the property. Abraham did not want his father's life. The Louisiana Purchase had opened up opportunities for young men their fathers never dreamed of. One could go as far as talent and ambition allowed. Foreign visitors remarked on the "longing to rise" that infected young Americans [17].
What made Abraham even dare to judge his father was what Fisher called a revolution in age relations [11]. The idea that all men are created equal had caught the American imagination. Equality in spirit had always been a tenet of Quakerism, but the American Revolution had young men questioning their fathers' despotism. Thomas's tyranny didn't mean only that Abraham had no free will to work on the farm or not. It also deprived him of intellectual growth. Abraham read books; there was no one to talk to about them.
Abraham made his break right around the time his father moved the family (yet again) to Coles County, Illinois in 1831.
We know from Abraham's account only that he put a small bundle of things on his shoulder and left on foot [18]. All his public life, Abraham never made a momentous decision without lengthy and solitary reflection. Then he would wait until the timing was right. Perhaps that was the case here, because twenty-two seems a little late. And as with all his decisions, once he made up his mind, he never changed it. Abraham sent money home, visited once in a while, and made executive decisions about the property after his father died, but he never put hand to plow again.
Thomas and his son had been caught in a period of social transition. If Abraham's generation chaffed, it was Thomas's that suffered the shocking loss of what they thought they were entitled to. It must have been cruel irony to have been young when age was exalted, and then be old when it was not [19].
Although Abraham rushed to see his father during an illness in 1849, he did not see him on his deathbed the next winter, citing work and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln's recent childbirth. "Say to him", he wrote his stepbrother John D. Johnston (to whom Thomas Lincoln was much closer) "that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones gone before; and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere-long to join them."[20] This was at odds with his opinion at the time of Ann Rutledge's death that there was no Hereafter [21]. But perhaps he meant to be comforting. Abraham did not attend his father's funeral. "He was not heartless", historian David Herbert Donald wrote, "but Thomas Lincoln represented a world that his son had long ago left behind him."[20]
Throughout all of Abraham Lincoln's writings, and the recollections of his speech, "he had not one favorable word to say about his father."[22] However, he named his fourth son Thomas, which "suggested that Abraham Lincoln's memories of his father were not all unpleasant."[23]. That may have been the reason, but naming a son after his grandfather was conventional enough, and by Number Four, the Lincolns were running out of names. A generation earlier, when exaltation of grandparents was the rule [24], Abraham would have been expected to name his first son Thomas (Abraham was named after Thomas's father).
But for all Abraham's reticence about his father, one thing speaks for itself. Thomas was a popular storyteller with a remarkable memory and gift for mimicry [16]. Abraham spent his earliest years in the corner of the room listening to the grownups, learning to emulate his father and enthrall his own friends later with a limitless supply of stories. It was one of his great political skills.
Portrayals
A 1970 episode of Daniel Boone, although fictionalized, portrays the courtship of Thomas Lincoln (played by actor Burr DeBenning) and Nancy Hanks (Marianna Hill). Sarah Bush Johnston is referred to but not seen. It is mentioned that the couple will name their first son after Tom's father, Abraham. Daniel remarks, "He might even be President someday."
Notes
- ^ Basler (ed.) 1953:60-61; 456; 511) in: Fischer 1991:837
- ^ Harrison, John Houston. Settlers By the Long Grey Trail. Dayton VA: 1935, pp 286, 350.
- ^ Allen C. Guelzo | Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity | Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 18.1 | The History Cooperative with quotes from Ida Tarbell, In the Footsteps of the Lincolns (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), 143–44; Charles Garnett Vannest, Lincoln the Hoosier: Abraham Lincoln's Life in Indiana (St. Louis, Mo.: Eden Publishing House, 1928), 7–8; William E. Barton, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 2:460.
- ^ http://www.nps.gov/archive/libo/thomas_lincoln3.htm (Sept. 11, 2010)
- ^ Fischer 1991:837
- ^ a b c d Goodwin 2006:47
- ^ Fischer 1991:491
- ^ Fischer 1991:481
- ^ Donald, David Herbert (1995). Lincoln. New York: Touchstone. p. 32.
- ^ http://www.historyillinois.org/frames/markers/277.htm
- ^ a b Fischer 1978:77
- ^ Fischer 1989:511
- ^ 2006:53
- ^ Fischer 1991:531
- ^ Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York; Touchstone, 1995, 32.
- ^ a b Goodwin 2006:50
- ^ Goodwin 2006:29
- ^ Goodwin 2006:54
- ^ Fischer 1978:103
- ^ a b Donald, 153
- ^ Goodwin 2006:57
- ^ Donald, 33
- ^ Donald, 154
- ^ Fischer 1978:99
Sources
- This article incorporates text from [1], a work of the National Park Service and as such in the public domain.
- Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York; Touchstone, 1995
- Fischer, David Hackett. Growing Old in America. Oxford University Press, 1978
- Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed. Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press paperback, 1991.
- Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals. The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2006